42: The Visuals-First Canva Workflow That Cuts My Content Time in Half (For Solopreneurs)

Spending hours in Canva every time you need to post? You're not alone! In this episode of The Creative Bodega, I'm breaking down my exact visuals-first system that cuts content creation time to about twenty minutes per post—without sacrificing brand recognition. You'll learn why your visuals should speak before your caption does, how to build a simple brand system that works on your busiest days, and the exact templates + workflow that keep you consistent without the overwhelm. If you're tired of starting from scratch every single time or feeling like your feed looks like a patchwork quilt, this one's for you. Let's make your brand recognizable at a glance.

Check out the full show notes for this episode HERE. 

Things I cover inside this episode:

• The Minimum Viable Brand Kit (MVBK) - how to decide your fonts, colors, and photo style once so you can publish on busy days without decision fatigue
• The Core Five Templates system - design once, duplicate forever, and stop reinventing the wheel every time you need content
• My 20-minute Canva-to-publish routine that takes you from hook to exported post without the time suck
• Why "casual doesn't mean careless" - how to keep a relaxed aesthetic while maintaining the recognizable vibe that builds trust
• The exact folder system and organization strategy that saves you from hunting for designs (and cursing your past self!)

Resource mentioned in the episode:

• Join The Visual Edit Waitlist: my once-a-year, crazy-hands-on program where we build your brand rules, core templates, file system, and publish-on-busy-days routine together (launching live mid-January with limited spots - join the waitlist for first access and early bird discounts!)

Connect with me:
🫶🏼 Follow me on Instagram for daily insights
🫶🏼 Join my 321 Create Newsletter for weekly content tips
🫶🏼 Check out The Content Coven Membership

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Transcript

0:00

Decide on a calm day so you can publish on a busy one, right? When your brand rules and templates live inside Canva and your routine is like muscle memory, you don't need willpower anymore. You just need a quiet five to 20 minutes to get a post out. Welcome to the Creative Bodega, a podcast about content marketing, Instagram growth, and personal branding for female service-based solopreneurs who wanna grow their business without letting it take over their lives. I'm your host, EM Connors, and each week I'll share actionable tips, expert advice, and unfiltered truths to help you create engaging content, connect authentically with your audience, and turn followers into loyal customers. All without the burnout. If you're ready to simplify your content creation, navigate the ever changing trends and build a business that works for you while staying sane in this crazy season of life, then you're in the right place. Welcome back to the Creative Bodega Podcast. Today I'm sharing why your visuals should speak before your caption does honestly and a simple Do this now system to make creating and publishing. So much faster. By the end of today's episode, you'll have a visuals first routine that cuts creation time to about 20 minutes per post and makes your brand recognizable at a glance. And that's honestly one of the biggest compliments I can get on Instagram when people say. I know it's your post before I even see the handle name or anything. Like I, your vibe, your visuals are so recognizable and so you, and they draw me in and I know they're yours and I'm like, oh, thank you. I think that's just really cool and I think that that's something that. Like just elevates somebody's brand or makes it more legit, to be really honest, is to have that distinct look and feel to your visuals. Because I don't know about you, but when I land on somebody's Instagram account and I go, or actually not if I land on their account, if, if one of their posts comes across my explore page or whatever and I land on their feed, um, or their grid. I judge. I literally, I do that five second audit of the bio. Is this for me? Is this somebody I want in my world? I scroll down, I look at the last four lines of posts. Is there a vibe? Is there a look? Is there a feel? Can I tell where the value is? Like. I am judging right, and I'm gonna make a decision if I'm gonna follow or not. So yeah, I actually think visuals really do matter as much as people wanna say that they don't. But a quick truth to kick us off here is that on Instagram right now, your visuals, they don't need to be polished and perfect and like in, in fact, I feel like people kind of don't love that vibe right now. The super buttoned up like agency level kind of graphics. I think you can pass on those. I think what's working is a more casual, laid back aesthetic. You know, thinking screenshots or quick mockups or hand drawn elements, handwriting type fonts, and real life photos o over. Brand photos. To be really honest, I'm finding that I'm really only using my brand photos in presentations now, and maybe small areas, small pictures, or as cutouts on my graphics, less so than taking up the whole, you know, design. So even creators who never touch Canva, they have a consistent look and feel and vibe. They're using the same fonts, they're using the same look of their photos. They're using the same spacing. Here's the key. The casual doesn't mean careless, and that's what I really wanna stress. You still need a vibe. You still need a look that people recognize before they even read a single. Word. Okay. And that recognizable vibe is what's gonna set you apart from the sea of other sameness posts out there. So today I'm gonna show you how to keep that relaxed feel, but make it cohesive so that your visuals speak first. Your captions work second, and you create content a lot faster. So. This is a very practical best practices episode. I'm gonna anchor everything in the real struggles and wins of my Signature Program alumni. So you might have heard of my signature program. It was called the Insta Canva Collective. I am renaming it very likely to the visual edit. By the time this episode comes out, I will have a brand new name. I just put a poll out yesterday and it looks like the visual edit is winning. So basically I'll have two signature programs, the visual edit, which is all about the visuals and creating and content faster in Canva and being super organized over there and having just a system. For creating your visuals and then the messaging edit, which is all about the copy, the words, and making sure that they're really clear and compelling. So. Soft reminder here. This is the exact flow that we're gonna build inside the visual edit. And again, that is my once per year program. It launches in January of 2026, around mid-January, and definitely hop on the wait list. I do expect spots to go quickly, just like the messaging edit. Did that sold out in 24 hours? Check the show notes for that link for sure. All right, let's start with the heart. Why visuals first and why it matters to your business. Your visuals should speak before your caption does. Your visuals are what's gonna stop Somebody scroll before your caption or your words do. That doesn't require perfection, but it does require recognizability. So the casual lived in look is totally in. You just wanna make it repeatable, so when your vibe is consistent. People clock you in half a second. Your trust climbs and your posts get read instead of being scrolled past. And I see it over and over when students nail their visuals and by nail I mean they decide on a few non-negotiable rules and reuse them. Confidence is the first thing that jumps. Okay. Then they post more, their engagement goes up and the sales follow, and the wild part is that that content creation time. Gets reduced by half, if not more, once all your systems are in place. So let's make that your reality, okay. To structure. Today, I'm pulling straight from the themes of my alumni responses to their intake form. Y'all know I love a good Google intake form before anybody starts a live hands-on program with me. I love to hear what your biggest struggles are, and that way I can honestly shape the program and make sure that I address all of them and help you find a solution. So. The core themes of most of my alumni before they took the visual edit, formerly the Insta Canva Collective overwhelm, inconsistency. Time drain low engagement and confidence dips. So for each theme, I'll share quick alumni sound bites or quotes from them, and then I'll give you the Do this Now solution. Okay? So keep your notes app handy or a piece of paper in a pen so you can jot down the rules you're going to adopt. And remember, you can find all the show notes for this episode over at the creative bodega.com/blog/ 42. All right. Theme number one, overwhelm. And where do I even start? So my former alumni, Amy, said, overwhelming confusion with how and where to begin. And then Tyler chimed in. Everything felt overwhelming. I had no clue how to use Canva. And hi, if that's you. You are so not alone. Most solopreneurs. Don't need more inspiration. They need a starting line and fewer decisions, okay? And that's what I teach and preach inside my program. So here's the fix. You wanna find the minimum viable brand kit, okay? Decide these once so you can publish on busy days. Number one, your fonts. You honestly need two. You need two. You need a headline and you need a body font. And if you wanna get crazy, you can add in a subheading. Okay? And the subheading could be something more fun like a handwriting or a scripty font. Your subheading isn't used as much. It's used in small areas. We're not gonna use a script font for full on headline. I want your headline font to be something incredibly legible and something that is. Recognizable and gonna stop people scroll. Your body font should be incredibly legible and quite boring to be honest. Two, you're gonna pick your colors. Pick three to five or three to six. You're gonna choose that one or two primary colors. The ones that you're gonna use the most, they typically tend to be lighter colors for me, or more neutral colors. You're gonna pick a couple supporting colors. Those can be just. Darker versions or lighter versions of those two primary colors to keep it super simple. One neutral. I use an off white that I absolutely love. It's got like a pink undertone. And one accent. If you love a pop, so for me, that's like that neon yellow color, which I love, but I only use that in small areas. Okay, number three, some logos, right? And honestly, I barely use these, but I do think that people need, you know, you need a logo here or there, so. Two versions, a full one, and then a very simple mark or a simple image is gonna work. It's gonna work wonders. Okay? And then four, a photo style. So pick a lien of how you want your photos to feel or look. Is it, you know? Clean screenshots. Is it like minimal mockups? Is it lifestyle images? Uh, are you using a certain filter for these pictures and yeah. Is it maybe headshots with consistent kind of crop look? Is it cutouts of yourself with maybe like that white border that's so in right now? So again, the minimum viable brand kit is your fonts, your colors, your logo mockups, and your photo style. Okay, and then I would add onto that number five. Just your overall vibe for your visuals. Are you funky? Are you more reserved and modern? Are you, you know, scrapbook style? Like what kind of look are you going for? And does it make sense for your brand and what your ideal client would be attracted to? Okay. Because that's pretty important. All right, so then you're gonna have a posting map right next. You're gonna make a one page posting map. You're gonna list your content pillars. And I will link an episode in the show notes to a content pillar episode. And then you're gonna pick two formats for each pillar. Okay? And that's gonna give you six very reliable post types that you can rotate through. So let's say pillar one is visual strategy, and then my two post format types would be a carousel and. Before and after visual, like two different types of posts I could do for that. Pillar. Pillar number two, maybe it's Canva, tips and tricks, right? The first posting style or format is gonna be a reel, and the second one is gonna be a step-by-step carousel look. Pillar number three. Maybe it's just promoting my offers and showing how I build a community. So we're gonna do maybe a client win or quote and a freebie promotion. So now you have direction, not just ideas. And I swear to God, that is the massive missing piece. And listen what I just broke down, that's not like Bible, that's not what you have to do. But you do need to take the time to find a strategy. That's gonna work for you and that makes sense for your brain. Okay? And inside the visual edit, I go over a bunch of different styles of posting strategies that you could use and stick to that I know will. Increase your engagement and your results. Theme number two, inconsistency and the posting ghost cycle. So one alumni called herself a former poster and ghoster until the visual edit, and another one said they had no posting schedule or templates, and they just felt lost and disorganized. If you've ever tried to be consistent, but your feed looks like a patchwork quilt in this solution. Is to build fewer templates that you actually reuse. Okay, so there's. Core five templates that I think everybody needs. What's the concept behind a reusable template? You design it once and you duplicate it forever. Like literally. You can even make it in a couple different color ways and then that expands your options even more. But I think you need to build these five and lock what never changes and stop reinventing the wheel. Like, well, I'll talk about my biggest mistakes at the end of this episode, but number one, you need a carousel. You need a carousel, and I actually think you need at least two different carousel designs that you love. One could be all graphics, no images, and one could be more image-based so that they look different. Um, so carousel one and carousel two. The third thing you're gonna need is. Real cover or two? Honestly, I'm saying one. But listen. Start with one, but then you can build, okay? Or you could at least make that one template in two different colorways. Okay? So you need a real cover. I think you need a freebie or course or newsletter, promotional type post. Or two, just assume, I mean two for all of these. And that is so that you can promote your stuff very effortlessly. Number five is that you need a quote or a list type template. So those very like snackable posts, right list templates for me do really, really well. They're very saveable. People don't wanna forget, and they are forgettable if you don't save them. So a list post is a great one to add into your roundup. Pro tip, you can lock in the elements that don't change. Again, like you just select something in Canva on your template and you hit the little lock button and it will never move or change. Okay? But then you can change the background color. You can change the text so that you know you pop in your new headline or anything like that. But any just recurring elements inside of your Canva design, you can lock them, okay, so that you don't accidentally move them, or you don't accidentally change them as you're changing other things. And then you can also star your top templates. So if you create folders inside of Canva and you're adding template designs inside of there, you can click the three dots in the right hand corner and you can star your designs. Pin them either or starring, will show up on your homepage of Canva and pinning them will put them at the very top of your folder, which is actually what I like to do, so that I always have them at my fingertips. I go right into my Canva folder. I find that template that I wanna create. I hit the three dots, I hit make a copy, and then I just start changing everything about it. And now it's already filed in the correct place and I am just tweaking everything. So if you love like a theme day, a simple cadence for batching could be like Monday. You write your hooks and your just your words in general, so your calls to action, your caption, your hooks, the words you come up with, the overall themes and messaging and goals for your posts for the week. Tuesday, maybe you design, right? You're duplicating those tried and true templates that you have ready to go inside your folders Wednesday. Maybe you are scheduling all of these in someplace like later.com, which is what I use. Thursday, you are working on engaging with other, you know, people in your community and really showing up in stories and building your community. And Friday you're gonna look at kind of what worked that week and maybe what didn't. I have an amazing analytic tracker that I swear by, so I'm not really reviewing much until the end of the month. I just don't like to get in my head about, you know, the likes or the lack thereof. So. If theme days feel like a lot, go to two days, right? On day one, you write all the words. On day two, you design and schedule, and you call it a day, okay? The magic is in the repetition, not the variety here. Uh, theme number three, my feed doesn't look cohesive. So Leslie, the visual edit alumni said. I now have a consistent look and feel and a detailed schedule of what to post and when. And that's the vibe. We want the cohesion without like handcuffs, right? So to do this, you're gonna build that brand hub inside of Canva, your brand kit. You loading your fonts, your colors, your drop in your logos, or like I use this rounded handle name. So at the created bodega and I made it to look like a curve and it'll fit like in the corner of my designs. I just love it. So I saved that in Canva. As an SVG file. So let's say you've, you open a design and you've got your logo inside of there, you're gonna fill it to the entire space. So a logo is typically 500 pickle pixels, pickles, 500 pixels by 500 pixels. You're gonna grab that logo or that element that you use, like I'm talking about this rounded handle name. You're gonna drag it to fill the space. Then you're gonna go up to share, and you're gonna choose to download it as an. SVG with a transparent background. Okay? It's gonna end up on your desktop. You are then gonna open your brand kit and you are going to drag that in as a logo. And now that means you can pop that design into any template that you're working on and you can change the color of it to any of your brand colors, which is super cool. So that's just a side note. Then you are going to make sure that you've uploaded all brand photos that you love using into that brand kit. You can even upload your brand tone of voice inside the Canva brand kit these days. So super cool and having all of that figured out, I'm telling you, is gonna save you so much time. It's like actually insane. Theme number four, time drain and decision fatigue. So raise your hand if you've ever sat down to make one post and two hours disappeared. I'm telling you guys, this happened to me last night. I'm not even kidding. And I'm really good at Canva, so it happens to the best of us. But Barbara, my alumni put it perfectly. Templates save so much time, and scheduling means I can set it and forget it. That is what I want for all my students. So here's an example of like a 20 minute content creation routine. Okay? Minutes one. Through five, you're gonna work on your words, the hook, the call to action, all that stuff that's going to show up on your design. Minutes five through 12, you're duplicating that reusable template that you've already designed in love, and you are swapping out headlines. You're swapping out the subtext and you're swapping out images. Okay? It's not a complete redesign of this layout. If you need a different layout, choose, you know, carousel A instead of carousel B, right from your core, five or six, but it's still duplication. I am never telling you to start with a blank page, minutes 12 through 16. You're just looking this over. You're looking at the spacing, you're checking your line breaks, you're making sure the headline is super, you know. Tangible and eye catching, and you're making sure that everything just feels very on brand. I love zooming out to like 25% because when you think about it, people see these images so small, so I like to kind of like either click on the grid view in the bottom right hand corner of Canva or I zoom out to 25% and just check that first slide. Especially right. Can a stranger understand the promise at a glance, and then minutes 16 through 20, you're just exporting it and you are publishing it right to Instagram or popping it into your scheduler. Something like later.com. But this routine's only gonna work if you decided on your rules and you built your core five or six templates. Okay? And that's the order, the rules, the templates, and then the routine theme. Number five, low engagement and confident dips. I mean, I think all of us can feel this to our core. So many of my alumni said some version of this. I felt like a poster and ghoster. I wasn't confident in my aesthetics. I didn't know what feedback. Our data mattered. Okay, and then Kelly, my alumni, shared a turning point. I woke up so excited to create my content for the next two weeks because I had a plan and the overwhelm was gone and that I have a plan. Energy is. What flips engagement? I'm not even kidding. I feel like people can feel when you're slapping together something and you're resentful of the post, and you're resentful of the time it took to make it, and you're not even super confident in how it looks or reads, that's not gonna get great engagement, right? Versus your colors, your branding is so on point and beautiful and recognizable. You've got these awesome templates that you can reuse. You have a plan of attack, and you're putting it out there with full confidence. I think it's gonna perform better. I'm not going to lie. So a little engagement checklist that I would love to see you use on every piece of content. Do you have a strong first slide? Right? What's the promise? In plain words, do not use fancy words if the promise is fuzzy. The saves and the shares are not gonna happen. Do you have a clear call to action? Every single one of my posts is performing a job. Even if it's save this, right? Or even if it's DM me, this word or join the wait list or comment this, right. Like one clear action. Is there any human face element to it? Like I do try to work in my face into every other post, whether it's me talking in the reel or me as a cutout on top of a carousel image, right? So at least one face in your grid, I'm gonna say every three posts at a minimum. Okay? People remember people. That's huge. Uh, is there a save worthy element to this? Is it a list? Is it a mini guide? Is it a template sneak peek? Is it something useful that people will want to save?'cause the algorithm loves to save and then follow through. I mean, how many people tell me, oh, I don't get any engagement, and then I go and I look or, and I comment on something and I never hear back from them. I'm like, if you want that engagement, you need to put that out into the world. Okay. Comments with warmth and clarity. You train your audience to talk to you. That's what you do. And how do you do that? You always reply in a really thoughtful way. Okay, so some quick wins, a little quick win montage, A few alumni lines that I loved that I got at the end of my program. So again, I give people a Google form inside my. Programs that are super high touch in the beginning saying, what's your biggest struggle? And then at the end I say, tell me how it feels now. Right? So these are some quotes. I woke up excited to create content for the next two weeks'cause I have a plan, templates plus a posting schedule. Set it and forget it from, I want to quit to I can do this. Confidence is what I'm feeling now. Creating the brand guide was literally transformational. I have already planned a month ahead. Batching is a huge time saver for me. I'm new to Canva, but now I know exactly what to look for and how to customize templates. Do you feel how that momentum stacks, none of those wins required aesthetic perfection, right? They required a decision about rules and a commitment to reusing them. Some common mistakes that I want you to skip so that you don't slide backwards at any point. Starting from scratch every time, like trying to find a brand new template every time you wanna post. I'm telling you, it is a massive. Waste of time. Yes, I retire certain templates and bring on new ones, but for the most part, I'm using those bad boys for six to eight months. I'm not even kidding. You don't have a folder system or pinned templates on your Canva home screen. That is a massive mistake, and that's something we go into in detail. I map out my entire folder system and basically tell you to copy it, designing before messaging. Okay? So if your hook is fuzzy, your design is gonna be fuzzy for people. Okay? So the words it, it's a, it's a two. Part thing, right? And that's why I've created two signature programs. One on the visuals and one on the messaging. They are equally as important, but I just find that teaching them both in one massive long program is very overwhelming for people. So that's why I broke it up. Uh, too many fonts or sloppy spacing. Okay? Nothing is gonna tank trust faster. Then wobbly hierarchy when it comes to your fonts. So if you're thinking, okay, um, but how do I organize this so that my future self isn't cursing me? Let me give you a super simple structure when it comes to organizing your designs inside of Canva. My folders are three to four levels deep. Okay? So my main folder would be called something like social Media. Okay? If you open up that folder or double click on it, you're gonna see probably four or five folders within that. And examples, one of them would be carousels. Okay. If I double click on that carousel folder, inside of there is gonna be three or four folders. One would be maybe Canva carousels, one would be font roundup carousels. One would be brand advice carousels. Okay. And then if you click into any of those, it's gonna be where the designs live. Okay, so I'm telling you it's really no more than three or four levels deep, but it is such a game changer if you are filing your templates accordingly. Right. So, and then all I need to do is then go into that folder to find the template I wanna use. Click the three dots and hit make a copy, and then it already lives inside that folder. Okay. It's just so good. I am such a big believer that systems should work on your busiest weeks, not just on the calm ones, and that is why I teach. Decide on a calm day so you can publish on a busy one, right? When your brand rules and templates live inside Canva and your routine is like muscle memory, you don't need willpower anymore. You just need a quiet five to 20 minutes to get a post out. So a little recap, you're gonna decide on your rules. Okay, so these are your. Brand kit rules, and then you're gonna build your core four or five, six templates and locking everything into place that doesn't need to change. You're gonna organize your Canva so that your future self can find everything in five seconds. And you're gonna try and follow that 20 minute routine, um, between developing the hook, duplicating a template, updating the template, exporting it, and publishing it. And then you're gonna review that monthly and track. What's happening, right? What got saves? What got follows, what got comments? And you're gonna just build upon the good stuff. Okay? So every post has a job to do and your visuals help that post get noticed, understood, and remembered really fast. If this episode felt like a breath of fresh air, or honestly if it felt like maybe a little overwhelming and like, you need some help, that's exactly what we are going to build together inside the visual edit your brand rules, your core templates, your filing system, and a publish on busy days' routine. That is personalized for you and your business. It is insanely hands-on. You will not make a post that I will not see and comment on. It is step by step and the goal is the same to build that recognizable brand and the faster path from idea to post. So please join the wait list for the visual edit. I'll put the link in the show notes. Again, it happens one time per year. It will be happening in mid-January. Very limited number of spots, so hop on that wait list for first access for that cart open and probably some discounts. I, I usually can't help myself, so I can't wait to see your visuals. Speak for you, my friend. Go set those rules, duplicate those templates, and go publish something today. You have got this. Thanks so much for hanging out with me on the Greater Bodega Podcast. If you love this episode, please be sure to share it with a fellow solopreneur. Who could use a little content creation inspiration. And hey, don't forget to check out the show notes for any resources I mentioned on the episode to help you create content that feels easy and actually gets you results. If you want even more Canva and content tips, head over to my website, the creative bodega.com, or find me on Instagram under the same name. Until next time, keep creating, keep showing up, and most importantly, try and have a little fun with your content. I'll see you on the next episode.